Cling to Dust

Cheap graveyard hate has always shared the same flaw: you draw the incremental exile spell late, when the opposing yard is already stocked and one point of disruption changes nothing. What one black mana buys here is the answer to that problem. The mode-per-target split keeps it from ever sitting dead in hand: exile a creature and pad your life total, exile anything else and replace the card. The choice is dictated by the board rather than by a clunky modal clause, so the spell is always live the turn it arrives. The real design work, though, is escape, which converts a one-shot answer into a recurring one. Cast it, then bring it back for by exiling five other cards from your graveyard, and again for as long as your yard can foot the bill. Against reanimator, dredge, delve, and anything leaning on its graveyard as a resource, that repeatability separates a real answer from a token gesture. There is a genuine tension in how it feeds on the same resource it attacks: each escape strips five cards from your own graveyard, so the spell taxes your future casts and demands you refill before you can grind again. That self-imposed cost is what keeps a repeatable exile effect from being oppressive, and it makes Cling to Dust one of the tidiest expressions of what escape promised: a card that is useful when you draw it and refuses to stay a spent resource afterward.